Clarissa Dickson’s Wright’s memoir ‘Spilling the Beans’

What do you do on summer vacation?  Beach Read!

I’m just finishing up Clarissa Dickson Wright’s memoir Spilling the Beans.  You know Clarissa, right?  She’s one half of the dynamic duo, along with Jennifer Patterson, of the television cooking show Two Fat Ladies. God, I love that show.

Part of the charm of the show is their outspokenness.  I’m sure people watched just to see what politically incorrect things Clarissa particularly but Jennifer too would say.  They had strong opinions and weren’t afraid to say them.

Clarissa’s memoir is similarly forthright.  Having been raised with an alcoholic and violent father who made everyone’s life a living hell, Clarissa is wedded to the truth ~ much like I am.  Not that I was physically abused at all, but I became painfully aware of the huge gap between what everyone agreed was the truth and what was my truth.  Why did these things not match?  I think that’s why I write realism ~ because what I’m trying to do is tell the truth as I see it.  Representing things with the fantastical is wonderful in its own right, but not what interests me.

But the problem comes when Clarissa’s declarations paint with such a broad brush.  “All alcoholics are this.” She simplifies things a bit too much for my taste on things that I know something about.  If only the world were that simple.  But at the same time, some of these pronouncements have great truth in them and also are very funny and wise.  But it’s hard to put your finger on exactly why they feel offensive at times.  I guess because they reduce people.  It feel very British colonial, which would make sense.  

Yet she's wonderfully understanding and nuanced about her father Arthur, who was such a lost soul and horrible family man yet great doctor. 

Clarissa is a good writer and has such a wonderfully wicked sense of humor.  She always goes for the salacious sex details, and I think a lot of the details she tells are rumors and gossip.  Which makes this memoir a wonderful tell-all, no matter how true it is. She’s not afraid to name drop.  It’s wonder she didn’t get sued. (Maybe she did.)

She goes into great detail about her alcoholism and all the horrible things she did and takes responsibility for it all.  She is genuinely warm and generous and wonderful.  And since I’m an Anglophile I love it, even as I’m hating myself for loving it because in a lot of ways it’s a gossip-rag.  It’s written for a British audience and so I don’t know a lot of the names of people, and she takes for granted that her audience knows, but really you don’t need to know to get the gist of things.

Did you know that Jennifer with Clarissa really did do a 180 on the bike in the Two Fat Ladies? Apparently, Jennifer planned to do it and didn’t tell the producer but told the cameraman to stay on them.  I’m not sure Clarissa knew ahead of time. Later, Jennifer offhandedly said that they would have flipped the bike had it been on gravel.  

Another thing that shocks me is that Clarissa was 48 when the first episodes were shot.  I’m 46.  That feels really weird.

And I’m reminded of the power of story.  A reader makes such a connection with the protagonist of a book that you forgive them everything, even if they are horrid.  When Clarissa was in the depths of her alcoholism, she was pretty horrid to everyone.  And the entitlement that comes with money is hard to put your mind around.  As someone who came from poor background, I find it hard to swallow the amount of pure selfish greed and the waste of a life in the middle there.

But I love her, you know?  She’s so charming and Brit Ish. I hope she’s happy now and with her mom (although as a realist I don’t subscribe to these notions). Bless you, Clarissa.

Words, Useful and Useless

Childhood Depression, by Richard Wilkinson (via)

I’ve been working my way back around to blogging every day.  I know I’m about ready when everything I come across sparks an idea for a blog post.

But then, yesterday, a relative committed suicide.  I won’t go into specifics or mention his name, but know that he was a beautiful young man.  By beautiful, I mean he might have been a male model.  Tall, with an athlete’s build.  Large soulful blue eyes and a sensitive mouth.  He was outgoing and gregarious and charming.  And he had a darling little boy.  I did not know him well, and I have never met his son.

But I’ve been thinking about words ~ what they mean, what they do, in a case like this.

My first reaction is that words do not cover a situation like this.  They do not encompass the set of feelings that comes up.  And I didn’t know him that well.  Imagine what it is like for those near and dear to him.

But, really, words are never enough.  They never encompass the full breadth and depth of experience, do they?  Especially in times of crisis, but also in ho-hum everyday existence.  Can you use words to describe what it’s like to wake up late from a dream that left you uneasy? You can’t quite remember it, but you know that it was deeply important.  Can you describe that feeling you have moving into a new place, how that place is not locked in your mind, but then after years that a feeling solidifies about the place, but it’s not the same as when you first walked into it?

But words are all we have.  That and violence, whether it’s turned outward or turned inward.  Maybe words are the lifeline that sometimes keeps us from turning to those other evil twins.  It’s how we get what’s inside us to come out.  To speak our truth.  And if we don’t, it festers and turns into a ticking time bomb.

But I’m also thinking about truths versus family loyalty.  Should I even mention the suicide?  By not mentioning it, I’m being loyal to family, but also in a weird way, it’s as if this young man never existed.  If you don’t witness out loud, that person’s life is back there in the silence.  The only way, now, he can live on is in the hearts and words of the people who knew him. 

I’m working my way toward writing a memoir, and so this is very much on my mind.  If it’s going to at all approach “the truth” or my personal truth, I have to be honest, but then I’ll be telling family secrets.

But my strong feeling is to talk about everything, to get it out in the open. Use discretion, of course, but also do what you have to. Secrets have the most power when they are held.  They can destroy you.  When you keep your family’s secrets, the toll is taken not on the family but on you.  And that’s something I think this young man would have known very well.

PS Someone just made an excellent point!  Words aren't the only thing we have.  We have Art, expression in all its forms.  Music, painting and drawing, dancing, embroidery, cooking.  Great point.

Spout, Ho!

(via)

I’m working toward starting the memoir.

Ooooh!  Did you feel that?  The chill that went from  the hairs on my head to the tip of my toes?

That’s because it scares the batshit out of me, yet it’s the thing I think I was meant to write, the work that I’ve been trying to get good enough to attempt my whole life.

I have a YA manuscript I want to finish, and then I want to go full steam ahead on the memoir.  Many of the small things I’m doing right now ~ essays, etc. ~ are work toward the memoir.

But the thing is:  a memoir that includes your family is nothing short of treason, isn’t it?  In order to write truthfully about the secrets of the family, you’re betraying them in the process?  See, that’s the part that scares the heck out of me.  Me being the youngest and the peacemaker, am I brave enough to be truthful about my take on things? 

Yet it’s a story that I feel HAS to be told.  You see, I want to focus on the 80s and 90s when my family had a whole Hatfields and  McCoys thing going ~ no one was ever shot but dogs were and gas tanks were sugared and there were fist fights and people tried to run over people with cars, legal battles.  I want to find the truth of it, to try to suss out my truth.  And interwoven through it is the whole gender thing ~ women in my culture are second-class citizens, something I struggled with for a lot of my life.

One of the reasons, though, I feel that it’s the story I was destined to tell is that I had no voice as a child and so this is the story that will vindicate that feeling of helplessness and ~ I’m just now realizing ~ rage.  I don’t want revenge.  I just want to understand.